‘Thank you — Mother. I am quite well — only tired. Thank you, I’ll see you in the morning.’ If she could he, so could you.
‘At least you’ll allow me, I hope, to kiss you goodnight.’
You submitted to it. She smelled still of calamine.
When her mother had gone Dorothy de Lascabanes lay and composed a schedule which had so far only erupted in her head by fragments. While through the wall a snore broke. A Norwegian snore could bore a hole. Her beloved, hateful Hubert had never succeeded in piercing her head.
But the princess survived the night, and on this morning forestalled Professor Pehl in the kitchen. That it was more than a forestalling, even this stupid, self-centred man must see. Anyway he kept looking at her with the eyes of a hangover, when he, a Scandinavian too, had not been in the slightest drunk. He was looking at her because, without being told, he had noticed she was dressed for better things; and what better than departure?
‘Professor Pehl,’ she began, ‘I have a favour to ask.’
A favour so evidently stern might have made a less phlegmatic man recoil.
‘I have been in touch with the mainland,’ she said. ‘The helicopter will come for me at ten. I would like you to drive me to the airstrip as soon as you have finished your coffee.’ She poured it for him; pas d’omelette aujourd’hui.
The professor could have experienced a shock. ‘You are leaving us, then?’
Without answering, she began picking over the things at the sink; till recognizing in her dry precision the movements of some bird, possibly a guinea hen, she gave up.
The professor had scalded himself on the coffee. ‘If we leave presently, as you wish, we will have the most of three hours to wait for this helicopter.’
‘I don’t expect you to keep me company in waiting. We might exasperate each other.’
He was so mystified, so anxious to please, he scalded himself a second time. ‘I do not understand what we have done to you.’ Coffee bubbled at his puzzled nostrils.
‘Nothing.’ She composed her lips in two strips which the hour and an absence of lipstick failed to make more communicative.
While they were driving down through the flickering trees and stationary ropes and trapezes of vines, he dared ask her, ‘Have you informed Mrs Hunter?’
‘No. And I must ask you not to tell her, Professor.’
‘But she is your mother,’ he groaned.
‘What of it?’ Then she shrieked, ‘I am not her doll, am I? Or am I?’
They were driving through the clearing in which the forestry workers were camped. Several of them had come out of the Nissen hut and were washing mugs and plates in a trough. Peering through the leather visors of their faces they had more than ever the air of zombies.
Were they expecting to be waved at? The Princesse de Lascabanes waved, describing an arc wide enough for men of a lower order to interpret as heartiness. The men did not wave back.
When the nonchalant car reached the airstrip, and the princess was standing beside her suitcase, holding the superfluous straw hat, she thanked Professor Pehl, and added, ‘My mother won‘t fail you: she’ll keep you entertained, I’m sure.’
Then Madame de Lascabanes sat down on a log at the edge of the field and began to spend her several hours. The heat had already begun pricking at the silence. The ants were climbing up her stockings. She opened her mouth, but the bitter drought inside was increased the more she sucked and gulped. Again she could feel Mother, rustling around her in the dark room, offering the suspect sponge people call affection. She saw the men standing in the clearing, not waving, but watching.
Thank God for the helicopter, though it would have the pilot in it; blessed the anonymity which would clothe her at last in the great plane flying her back with speed and discretion to Europe.
‘What was that man’s name, dear?’
‘Which man, Mother?’
‘You know — the Norwegian — when somebody invited us to an island.’
Standing at her mother’s window in Moreton Drive waiting for the brother who could not keep an appointment. Madame de Lascabanes was no longer sure she had reached the pitch of ruthlessness she had sensed that morning in her dressing-table glass. Certainly the several looking-glasses in Mother’s room, survivors from a heyday of vanity, disclosed nothing that might suggest vacillation. (Ah, but you know yourself better than any glass. And how much does Mother know? Whatever the old thing remembered of Brumby Island, she had handed you a whole armoury of weapons; if you had the courage to choose and use the most vicious of them.)
‘Pehl — Edvard Pehl was the name.’
Mrs Hunter kicked at the upper sheet. ‘I’m surprised you remember — after all this time. But you’re young, Dorothy — anyway, younger. And perhaps you were fond of the—ecologist?
Dorothy swallowed: keep your rage from exploding till after Basil’s arrival. 1 thought he was your interest, Mother.’
‘I had to do my duty by him, stupid though he was.’
Dorothy longed to reply: Women of seventy can’t afford to reject a man simply because of his stupidity; but in spite of keeping Brumby in mind, she was not brutal enough; nor was Mother, who might have dealt a counterthrust: For a plain woman of any age, though especially while in her Frightful Forties, a man’s stupidity is a negligible fault,
Well, all that was over now: neither of you would ever be tempted again by a man. Or would they tempt Elizabeth Hunter’s mummy?
‘It was the island I loved, Dorothy. After you left I got to know it. After I had been deserted — and reduced to shreds — not that it mattered: I was prepared for my life to be taken from me. Instead the birds accepted to eat out of my hands. There was no sign of hatred or fear while we were — encircled. What saved me was noticing a bird impaled on a tree. It must have been blown against the sharp spike left by a branch which had snapped off. I think I was reminded that one can’t escape suffering. Though it’s only human to try to escape it. So I took refuge. Again, it was the dead bird reminding me the storm might not have passed. Afterwards I found out — the man told me — the bird was a noddy.’
So truth was beginning to seep through this vision of an island conjured up by a senile mind. ‘Who told you, Mother? If, as you say, you were deserted?’
It must have been the man driving the lorry.’
Madame de Lascabanes was so enraged by this piece of deceitful evasion she understood the urge to commit physical murder, when up till now the thought of gently prising a confused soul out of an exhausted body had been enough to cause an attack of moral misgivings. The voices she heard approaching from the other side of the door were, in the circumstances, godsent.
Whereas the nurse must have decided to forget the princess was lurking in her patient’s bedroom and to shut the door smartly on admitting the latest and far more acceptable caller, Sir Basil Hunter looked as though he could not wait to shake off his tedious guide and take his sister by the hands. This, and the expression of moist-eyed, hesitant inquiry Basil was wearing, surprised, then charmed Dorothy. In every other respect his appearance advertised masculine self-command: freshly shaven cheeks giving off gusts of an aggressive, though not disagreeably pungent lotion; hair cleverly trimmed to within an inch of Romantic excess; clothes pressed or laundered to a degree that the man of the world demands, then ignores.
At the reunion after their independent return, Dorothy had been disturbed on finding Basil reminiscent of Hubert. Now she was not at all reminded. In spite of the dreadful intimacies forced on her by the man with whom she still considered herself spiritually united, she had never arrived at the real Hubert. Each meeting might have been the first, in which hope of reciprocal love was dissolved by her breathless adoration, and moral qualms anticipated physical repulsion. None of which could enter into her relationship with a brother whose moist eye in the assured façade was a peephole she would not hesitate to use; in fact, she had already peeped, and found that this was a Basil she knew better than the mirror knew him. She knew him, she thought, as she knew her actual self, as opposed to the one which others saw. She even found herself warming towards their mother for having made a less animal version of identical twins: mutually appreciative siblings.